Recipe For Getting Sick

Wednesday Busy day knowing I’m heading out of town for a bit. Rush around tying up loose ends at work, before heading out to Bay Area Blawgers event (not sure I qualify, and not sure I like being in a room full of lawyers, but hey, it was fun), meet cool folks like Matt Cutts, recognize that you can’t easily sneak out by 7pm as you had promised… stick around to the end. Then rush up the peninsula to meet Sunnia and Teck for dinner. Head back home to show Teck around (he’s house/cat sitting), pack (yeah, that’s important) and finish up some work. Finish up at 2:30am. Realize I need to be awake at 4:30am to get to airport.

Thursday Wake up after 2 hours of sleep. Rush to airport, get on plane, sleep somewhat. Carlo later tells me that airplane sleep counts for 1/3 of regular sleep. Noted. Stop over at O’Hare. Plane is late getting there, giving us enough time to use bathroom, grab McDonald’s (healthy) and rush to gate to get on the plane as nearly the last passengers. Fly to Laguardia. Land right at 5pm local time — and decide that it’s probably easier to ride out rush hour at aunt’s in Queens than trying to make it to Manhattan with luggage. Dinner with aunt, uncle and grandparents (just arrived themselves earlier in the week). Nice to see everyone. Exhausted, though. Hop on subway. Get screwed up at the transfer, have to back track, etc. Finally get up to Artis’ place around 10pm. Check in with work. Oh look, there’s work to do. Work until 2am. Sleep.

Friday Spend all day running up and down Manhattan from meeting to meeting. End up eating two lunches, but no dinner (evens out), including one at the aptly named Fried Dumpling. “Best $2 Lunch in NY” sign says. I believe it. Eventually end up back at Artis’. Pack up, run down to Penn Station, screw up transfer again (I really did used to understand the subway system). Take the LIRR out to the Island. Parents pick us up, spend time showing us redone kitchen and wanting to discuss life/wedding/etc as we are falling asleep. Finally go to sleep.

Saturday Awake at 5:30am to drive down to Baltimore. Stop off at old high school job bagel place. Buy some bagels from old boss’s wife and old boss’s son (they don’t recognize me). Start driving. Realize parents never gave us car registration… realize it might be important. Double back, pick up registration. Head back to Baltimore. Actually, amazingly, drive all the way to Baltimore by 10:30am, with just enough time for Sunnia and I to change into nice clothes and get seated for Adam and Kate’s wedding. Adam and Kate’s wedding runs until 4pm. Lots of fun. Catching up with the old gang, blah, blah, blah. Leave wedding, go to hotel. At wedding, Adam mentions that he left a note for us at the hotel with directions to pub where everyone’s meeting later that night. Hotel has no idea about note, but says someone left a plate of chocolate covered strawberries for us. Take the strawberries, go to room, fall fast asleep for 3 hours (yay, sleep). Sunnia stays up to eat half the strawberries. I wake up, eat my half (delicious), Sunnia wants to sleep and not go to pub. SMS Adam, calls with directions including super secret “cheap” parking garage in downtown Baltimore. Drive to downtown, garage is not only cheap ($3 unlimited time) but empty. Hang out with old gang again. Catch up with Steve, Rob, Adam and assorted wives. Adam has no idea about delicious chocolate covered strawberries. Apparently they were meant for someone else. Realize my voice is disappearing. Don’t drink anything alcoholic all day, figuring that’s probably not a good idea. Leave pub at midnight. Drive back to hotel, explain why I didn’t bring back food (oops) for Sunnia. Go to sleep.

Sunday Wake up at 7:30am to drive to DC Metro to go into DC to see cherry blossoms (a requirement of the trip). Feel more hungover than I’ve ever been, despite not having had anything alcoholic to drink previous day. It’s cold and gray out. Meet up with Donna and Ben who show us around and we get to catch up. See the 3000 or whatever cherry blossom trees, take a bunch of pictures, and get back on the Metro by noon. Get to car around 12:30 and decide we’ll get lunch on the road. Know we need to be back in NY by 6, figure we can sit for a slightly longer lunch than fast food. See sign for IHOP. Discover highway sign for IHOP neglects the 5 mile distance from the highway. Also, didn’t count on Sunday brunch crowd. Decide to try innocuously named “Irene’s Restaurant” down the street. Turns out it’s Mexican food. Not what we wanted, but we’re already here. It’s half empty. Should be quick, right? Discover the world’s slowest restaurant service. Ends up taking almost 1.5 hours. Leave tiny tip, get back on road. Now it’s raining. Sunnia drives and I sleep a bit (car sleep: even less productive that airplane sleep). Get to NJ, I start driving again. Stuck in traffic. NJ Tpke not much fun. My head is killing me. Stupid GPS system continually tells us “In 2 miles, stay on the current road… In 1.5 miles, stay on the current road… etc….” Note to GPS makers: no need to tell us when you want us to stay on the current road. Decide to ignore GPS’s plan to take us through Manhattan (common sense module not included in GPS system) and get stuck in Staten Island instead. Eventually get back an hour late for Sunnia’s “no longer a surprise” bridal shower. Even though I’m invited, I say “I’m sick” and proceed upstairs and collapse, noting that I have a fever, a hacking cough and feel generally grumpy. Sunnia and guests apparently had lots of fun, though.

That was all a week ago. The rest of this past week involved trying to recover from that experience (and never having nearly enough time to complete this blog post). I thought I was getting better by Tuesday evening, only to get worse when I needed to get up early both Wednesday and Thursday (Thursday for my flight to Chicago). But got more sleep Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. of course, now I need to get up crazy early tomorrow morning to catch my flight back to CA. I’m still coughing like a mad man, which I’m sure everyone else on the flight will be thrilled with… Hopefully on the way to being better for real, though…

It Makes Sense

This might or might not have happened earlier. If it did happen, I might or might not have taken creative liberties.

Her: Hey, can you put that box of contact solution I bought away?
Me: What’s that over there?
Her: Oh, that’s more contact solution.
Me: You bought them both today? But it’s a different brand.
Her: Yeah, the first one was on sale.
Me: That doesn’t explain…
Her: But the other one is the brand I use.
Me: *blank stare*
Her: It makes sense.
Me: *Puts the contact solution (both of ’em) away*

Sometimes it’s better not to ask questions.

You Have Got To Be Kidding Me, Windows Mobile

I’ve already written about the ridiculous hoops Microsoft’s mobile operating system has made me jump through, but things only got worse tonight. I had actually reached an uneasy truce with the software, had set it up to my liking, and just about everything was working great. I’d even gone out and tried purchasing a couple of time waster games from Handango (gotta have something to play on long flights).

There were just two small things. The first is that Windows Mobile got caught by the Daylight Savings bug, so that every time I tried to sync it with my computer, it went back to being an hour behind schedule. I looked up how to fix it, but it required upgrading the syncing software to ActiveSync 4.5 rather than 4.0. There were some horror stories about that so I figured I’d survive for a few weeks with the clock being an hour off.

The other thing was that, as a few people had suggested, it’s not all that easy to scroll through your address book to make calls — especially when driving. So I figured I’d bite the bullet and get some voice recognition software. I bought one at Handango for $6… but it wouldn’t install. Every time I tried, it would cancel itself in the middle with no explanation. Over to the manufacturer’s website, and they note that I have the wrong version of Windows Mobile, but Sprint has an easy download upgrade package. Ah, great. And it’s just a minor upgrade 5.1.170 to 5.1.195. How much could possibly go wrong (hint: foreshadowing).

Yeah, so I click the link, download the 45 meg (that should have been a warning sign) upgrade file, and give a whirl… What does it do? It resets the entire phone. Suddenly everything I had set up, all the contacts I had put in, all the software I had bought and installed… gone. And, even better… I can’t get it to sync at all. What’s the problem? Well, it needs ActiveSync 4.5 rather than 4.0 — so I need to upgrade. Another big download, another crazy install process… and it requires me to restart my computer. Go do the reboot, and then… it’s still cranky. I do get my contacts back in (phew), but that’s it. It refuses to admit that any of my old software exists. In fact, the ActiveSync is downright rude about it:

“If a program you installed is not listed, the program was not designed to be used with your mobile device.”

Well, that’s just wrong. Not only was most of the software designed to work with my mobile device IT WAS WORKING with my mobile device until you pushed me to upgrade. The software files are still listed in the ActiveSync directory on my computer, but ActiveSync itself insists they don’t exist.

This isn’t exactly making me a fan of Microsoft’s mobile efforts…

On the plus side, the new versions of these software (a) have a built in voice dialing ($6 wasted apparently) and (b) no longer requires me to sync my email (which I never wanted to do in the first place). But, I’d rather just have kept my programs working (crazy as that may sound). Hell, even just being able to reinstall them would be nice.

Whatcha Gonna Do…?

Ok. Now that I’ve done the video blog thing and the photo blog thing, I might as well figure out how to do the music blog thing. I just installed the audio player plugin that plenty of sites seem to use and wanted to test it out with a few of the songs I’ve been listening to this week.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In theory, clicking on that sucker above should play three songs for you. For your listening pleasure, they’re three amazing new tracks from Vic Ruggiero’s latest (solo) album, Hamburguru, which (tragically and inexplicably) is only available in Japan… or through Chuck, which is how I scored my copy.

You know how sometimes when you’re in a group of people and a conversation wanders and wanders over time and then someone asks how you got from point A to point Z? And then people walk backwards through the string of the conversation to figure out all the twists and turns? I keep doing that with my life, where I start wondering how certain things happened that never would have happened if not for random event X so many years ago. With that in mind, I started wondering how I came to be listening to a Japanese CD from a guy in Brooklyn that I bought from a guy in Chicago, and realized that it’s a process that went back about 20 years or so. As I was looking for stuff to blog about, I figure I may run that string back to the beginning and see if I can figure out my music obsession from way back when. Should be a fun way to make use of the audio plugin at least. At my current pace of blogging, it may take a while to actually run through the whole string, and I imagine I’ll be posting other stuff during that time as well, but this should serve as at least mildly entertaining filler and/or random nostalgia depending on who you are (all three or four of you, that is).

Happy Cows…

One cool thing about having the new phone is that I’ve finally got a semi-decent camera phone. I guess I’ve had it for a while, but since it wasn’t my real phone, I never really thought about using it for taking photos. So now I can do posts like these, including some photos snapped with the cameraphone.

Way back when, Sunnia and I used to take our dog Sugar hiking in Sunol, which was a lot of fun. But, the hike is pretty strenuous and Sugar can’t handle it any more. However, for a couple weeks we’re taking care of Vince and Natasha’s dog (so they can go get married somewhere), Apple. And, since Sugar is still in Chicago and today turned into a gorgeous day, we thought we’d take Apple hiking in Sunol.

It really is a beautiful place, and is great for dogs because there’s also a nice creek that runs through part of it where the dogs can swim. I discovered a pretty cool feature of the cameraphone as well. It has a “sports” setting that will let you snap from 5 to 30 photos in rapid succession, which I tried to use (not all that successfully) to capture Apple chasing a stick in the creek.

As you walk up the hill, though, there are some great views.



At the top, you can look down on quite a view, with some huge birds (hawks? eagles?) flying around below you. I tried to take a photo of the birds, but I didn’t do a great job. You can still see some of the scenery, though.



The coolest part of hiking in Sunol, though, is that the hiking trail is actually through a cow pasture, and there are a lot of very big cows that don’t seem particularly afraid of you. Early on there was a fairly big cow that started jogging towards us and I began to get nervous… until Sunnia started “mooing” at it. She claims that all you need to do to stop a cow from charging you (and I’ll admit, the cow wasn’t charging, just jogging…) is make a loud mooing noise, and maybe raise your arms to look bigger. I’m not sure I believe her, but it seemed to work.

Of course, if you’ve seen the Real California Cheese commercials, you know that “happy cheese, comes from happy cows… and happy cows come from California.” So, here you go. Some happy California cows.

Not sure how interesting a blog post this is, but, hey, I’m still getting the hang of this blogging thing, and throw in that camera phone and, wow, two new things at once. Next thing you know, I’ll even be messing around with Flickr.